Emergent Research

EMERGENT RESEARCH is focused on better understanding the small business sector of the US and global economy.

Authors

The authors are Steve King and Carolyn Ockels. Steve and Carolyn are partners at Emergent Research and Senior Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research. Carolyn is leading the coworking study and Steve is a member of the project team.

Videos

Disclosure Policy

Emergent Research works with corporate, government and non-profit clients. When we reference organizations that have provided us funding in the last year we will note it.
If we mention a product or service that we received for free or other considerations, we will note it.

During our food truck project we've heard a wide range of estimates on the number of food trucks in the U.S. - everything from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands.

But 3 million? Let's do a quick sanity check on this:

1. There are about 350 million Americans. 3 million food trucks would mean 1 food truck for about every 117 Americans. This means my town of Lafayette CA (population 25,000) should have 213 food trucks. We don't.

It also means San Francisco should have about 7,000 food trucks. This is a bit higher than the roughly 250 we think SF has.

2. The average food truck employs around 3-4 people (a conservative estimate) including the owner. 3 million food trucks would mean about 10 million Americans work in food trucks. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, a bit more than 140 million Americans are currently employed. This would mean about 1 out of every 14 employed Americans works in a food truck. This seems unlikely to me.

5. If the average food truck is 15 feet long (another conservative estimate) and they all parked in a row they would stretch 45,000,000 feet. This is roughly 8500 miles, or about distance from New York City to Hong Kong.

You get the point.

It's almost always hard to find good numbers on new industries or new markets. Also, it's easy to find bad online statistics. For example, I have no idea if TruckInfo is a good or bad source of data - but it didn't stop me from quoting them.

So the lesson is don't believe everything you read about market sizes.

We don't know how many U.S. food trucks there are, but our guess is closer to 15,000 - 20,000 than 3 million.